Текст книги "A Spool of Blue Thread"

Автор книги: Anne Tyler

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

In Hampden, the rest of the world was enjoying an ordinary Monday morning. Two heavyset women stood talking to each other, one of them trailing a wheeled cart full of laundry. A man pushed a bundled-up baby in a stroller. The weather had started out cool but was rapidly growing warmer, and some people wore sweaters but a girl emerging from a liquor store was in short shorts and rubber flip-flops.

The church turned out to be a small, unassuming white cube topped with more of a cupola than a steeple, squeezed between a ma-and-pa grocery store and a house already decorated to the nines for Halloween. They might have missed it altogether if not for the signboard in front. HAMPDEN FELLOWSHIP was spelled out across the top of the frame, with WELCOME HOME PRIVATE SPRINKLE in movable type below. There wasn’t even a parking lot, or not one that Denny could locate. They had to park on the street. As they were piling out of the car, Jeannie and Hugh drew up behind them with their two children and Hugh’s mother. Then Amanda and her Hugh walked up with Elise, who was wearing patent-leather heels and a shiny, froufrou dress so short she could have been a cocktail waitress. A patch of pancake makeup nearly hid her black eye. All it took was the sight of each other for Jeannie and Amanda to dissolve in torrents of tears, and they stood on the sidewalk hugging while Mrs. Angell clucked sympathetically and clasped her purse to her bosom. She wore a pretty flowered hat that looked very churchlike. In fact all of them were dressed in their best today except for Red, whose dashiki hem flared below his Orioles jacket.

Eventually, they climbed the two front steps and entered a low-ceilinged white room lined with dark pews. It had the deep chill of a place that had sat through an autumn night without heat, although a furnace could be heard now rumbling somewhere below. A wooden lectern faced them, with a plain dark cross on the wall behind it, and off to one side a woman with dyed red hair was playing “Sheep May Safely Graze” on an upright piano. (Reverend Alban had already explained that his choir members were working folk and would not be able to sing on a weekday.) The pianist didn’t look in their direction but continued plinking away while they threaded up the aisle and settled in the second row. Possibly they could have chosen the first row, but there was unspoken agreement that that would have felt too show-offy.

A tall vase of white hydrangeas stood in front of the lectern. Where had those come from? The Whitshanks hadn’t ordered flowers, and they had specified in the Sun that they didn’t want any sent – just donations to the House of Ruth, if people were so inclined. Abby had been odd about flowers. She liked them growing outside, unpicked. Jeannie whispered, “Maybe they’re from someone’s yard,” which would have been preferable, at least, to flowers from a florist, but Amanda, sitting next to her, whispered, “Isn’t it too late in the year?” They could have spoken in normal tones, but they were all a little self-conscious. None of them felt entirely certain about funeral etiquette – whom to greet, where to look, who should be handed discreet envelopes of cash at the end of the service. Twice just this morning, Amanda had phoned Ree Bascomb for advice.

The children sat at the far end, with Susan in the middle because she was from away and therefore the most interesting. Red was on the aisle, at Amanda’s insistence. She had pointed out that friends might like to stop by his pew and say a few words to him. Since this was exactly what Red feared, he sat hunch-shouldered with his head lowered, like a bird in the rain, and stared fixedly at his knees.

Reverend Alban entered from a side door near the piano. Eddie, he’d asked them to call him. He was a very blond, disconcertingly young man in a black suit, his skin so fair that you could see the blood coursing beneath it. First he bent over Red and pressed Red’s right hand between both of his own, and then he asked Amanda if she had the list of people who would be speaking. At the time of his visit to the house they hadn’t yet decided on the speakers, but now Amanda handed him a sheet of paper and he ran his eyes down it and nodded. “Excellent,” he said. “And how do you pronounce this one? E-lyce?”

“E-leece,” Amanda said firmly, and Jeannie stiffened next to her. It didn’t seem a good sign that he had had to ask. He slipped the paper inside his jacket and went to sit on a straight-backed chair beside the lectern.

Guests had begun trickling into the pews behind them. The Whitshanks heard footsteps and murmurs, but they went on facing forward.

Reverend Alban – Eddie – had admitted during his visit to the house that he hadn’t known Abby personally. “I’ve only pastored at Hampden three years,” he’d said. “I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to get acquainted. I’m sure she was a very nice lady.”

The word “lady” had made them all go steely-faced and wary. This man had no idea of Abby! He was picturing some old biddy in orthopedic shoes. “She was not but seventy-two,” Jeannie told him with her chin out.

But he himself was so young, that must have sounded old to him. “Yes,” he’d said, “it always feels too soon. But the Lord in his wisdom … Tell me, Mr. Whitshank, do you have any wishes of your own for the service?”

“Me? Oh, no,” Red had said. “No, I’m not … I don’t … we haven’t thrown a lot of funerals in this family.”

“I understand. Then might I suggest—”

“It’s true my parents passed away, but I mean, that was so sudden. Their car stalled on the railroad tracks. I guess I was in shock; I really don’t remember too much about the funeral.”

“That must have been—”

“Now that I look back on it, I don’t feel like I really took it in. I feel like it sort of slipped by me. And it all seems so long ago, although truth to tell it was only back in the sixties. Modern times! We’d sent men into space by then. Why, my folks lived long enough to see aluminum-frame window screens, and clip-on fake mullions and flush doors and fiberglass bathtubs.”

“Just fancy that,” Reverend Alban had said.

So what with one thing and another, his visit hadn’t settled much. None of the family knew what to expect when he rose to stand at the lectern, finally, and the piano fell silent.

“Let us pray,” he told the congregation. He held up both arms and everyone rose; pews creaked all through the room. He closed his eyes, but the Whitshanks kept theirs open – all but Nora. “Heavenly Father,” he intoned in a hollow-sounding voice, “we ask you this morning to comfort us in our bereavement. We ask you to …”

“That Atta woman’s here,” Jeannie whispered to her husband.

“Who?”

“The orphan who came to lunch last month, remember?”

Apparently, in the process of rising for the prayer, Jeannie had contrived to cast a backward glance at the congregation. Now she glanced again and said, “Oh! And there’s the driver of the car. She’s got somebody with her; could be her husband.”

“Poor gal,” Hugh said.

The driver of the car that killed Abby had paid a visit to the house the day after the accident, all upset, and apologized a dozen times even though it was common knowledge that it hadn’t been her fault. She kept saying that she would see that sweet dog till her dying day.

“There are a lot of people here,” Jeannie whispered, but then a look from Amanda hushed her.

Abby had not specified a Bible reading, but Reverend Alban provided one anyhow – a long passage from Proverbs about a virtuous woman. It was okay. At least, the family found nothing offensive in it. Then they were asked to sing a hymn called “Here I Am, Lord” that none of them was familiar with. Evidently Reverend Alban had felt the need of more musical selections than Abby had suggested. But that was okay too. Jeannie said later that it made her envision Abby arriving in heaven all brisk and bustly and social-worky: “Here I am, Lord; what needs doing?”

Abby had specified a poem. An Emily Dickinson poem, “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking,” which Amanda read aloud at the lectern, after first welcoming everybody and thanking them for coming. She was the only one of Red and Abby’s children who had wanted to speak. Denny claimed he wasn’t good at such things; Jeannie had worried she would break down; Stem had simply said no without giving any reason.

However, Merrick had volunteered. Merrick! That was unexpected. She had flown in from Florida as soon as she heard the news and come directly to the house, prepared to roll up her sleeves and take over. Amanda had managed to fend her off, but no one could deny her when she begged to say a few words at the service. “I knew Abby longer than anyone did,” she had said. “Longer even than Red!” And that was how she began her speech, standing not behind the lectern but beside it, as if to give the congregation the full benefit of her stark black dress with the asymmetrical hemline. “I knew Abby Dalton since she was twelve years old,” she said. “Since she was a scrappy little Hampden girl whose father owned one of those hardware stores where you walk in off the street and say, ‘Oh, my God! I’m so sorry! I seem to be in somebody’s basement!’ Shovels and rakes and wheelbarrows crowded up close together, coils of rope and lengths of chain hanging down from this really low ceiling you could practically bump your head on, and a tabby cat sound asleep on a sack of grass seed. But you know what? Abby turned out to be the livest wire in our whole school. She wasn’t held back by her origins! She was a firecracker, and I’m proud to say she was my closest, dearest friend.” Then her chin began to quiver, and she pressed her fingertips to her lips and shook her head and hurried back to her seat, which happened to be next to her mother-in-law. All the other Whitshanks looked at each other with their eyes wide – even Red.

Next came Ree Bascomb, bless her heart, tiny and sprite-like in her cap of bouncy white curls. She started talking while she was still walking up the aisle. “I was actually at a hardware store once with Abby,” she said. “Not her father’s, of course. I didn’t know her back then. I got to know her when we were young mothers going stir-crazy at home, and sometimes we’d just take off together, hop into one or the other’s car and throw the kids in the backseat and drive somewhere just to be driving. So one day we were at Topps Home and Garden because Abby wanted a kitchen fire extinguisher, and while the man was ringing it up she said, ‘Do you mind hurrying? It’s kind of an emergency.’ Just being silly, you know; she meant it as a joke. Well, he didn’t get it. He said, ‘I have to follow procedures, ma’am,’ and she and I just doubled up laughing. We were crying with laughter! Oh, I don’t think I’ll ever again laugh as hard as I laughed with Abby. I’m going to miss her so much!”

She stepped away from the lectern dry-eyed, smiling at the Whitshanks as she passed them, but hers was the speech that made Jeannie and Amanda grow teary all over again.

“Thank you,” Reverend Alban said. “And now we’ll hear from Elise Baylor, Mrs. Whitshank’s granddaughter.”

Elise had an index card with her. She teetered up to the lectern on her strappy high heels, gazed out at the congregation with a dazzling smile, and cleared her throat. “When me and my cousins were little,” she said, “Grandma would call us on the phone and say, ‘It’s Saturday! Let’s have Camp Grandma!’ And we’d all go over to her house and she would do handicrafts with us – pressed flowers and pot holders and Popsicle-stick picture frames – or she’d read to us from these storybooks about children from other lands. I mean, some of those books were boring but parts were, like, sort of interesting. I’m going to remember my grandma for as long as I live.”

Deb and Susan glared at her – it must have been the “my grandma” that irked them – while Alexander took on the sullen expression of a boy trying not to cry. Elise gave the congregation a triumphant look and clopped back to her seat.

“Thank you, all,” Reverend Alban said. He nodded to the pianist, who pivoted hastily toward the piano and started on a rendition of “Brother James’s Air.” It seemed a peculiarly lighthearted tune for the occasion. Amanda’s Hugh absentmindedly tapped one foot to the beat, till Amanda leaned forward and sent a meaningful frown down the row to him.

At the end of the piece, Reverend Alban rose and approached the lectern again. He placed his fingertips together. “I didn’t know Mrs. Whitshank,” he said, “and therefore I don’t have the memories that the rest of you have. But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories – all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth. The hardware store their father owned with the cat asleep on the grass seed, and the friend they used to laugh with till the tears streamed down their cheeks, and the Saturdays when their grandchildren sat next to them gluing Popsicle sticks. The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. ‘That’s what my experience has been,’ they say, and it gets folded in with the others – one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive.”

Then he raised his arms and said, “Page two thirty-nine in your hymnals: ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ ” and everybody stood up.

“I don’t understand,” Red said to Amanda, under cover of the music. “Where did he say she went?”

“To a vast consciousness,” Amanda told him.

“Well, that does sound like something your mother might do,” he said. “But I don’t know; I was hoping for someplace more concrete.”

Amanda patted his hand, and then she pointed to the next line in the hymn book.

Ree Bascomb had warned them earlier that people would surely show up at the house right after the service. Whether or not they were invited, she said, there they’d be, expecting food and drink. So at least the family was prepared when the first caller rang the doorbell. Without so much as a pause to catch their breaths, they were back to murmuring thank-yous and accepting hugs and allowing their hands to be clasped. Ree’s maid offered trays of little sandwiches delivered that morning by the caterer. A trio of Middle Eastern men, more formally dressed than Abby’s own sons, watched in shocked silence as Stem’s three boys chased each other around the legs of the grown-ups, and a tiny old woman whom nobody knew asked several people whether there were any of those biscuits that Abby used to make.

When Denny said his goodbyes before driving Susan to the train station, it was clear that he assumed the guests would be gone by the time he got back. But no, there they still were when he returned. Sax Brown and Marge Ellis were arguing about Afghanistan. Elise had got hold of a glass of white wine; she was pinching the stem daintily between her thumb and index finger with all her other fingers splayed out, and her makeup had worn thin and her black eye was re-emerging. Ree Bascomb’s maid was serving crudités in her stocking feet now, and Ree herself, who had maybe had a tad too much to drink, stood with an arm looped around the waist of somebody’s teenage son. Red looked exhausted. His face was gray and sagging. Nora was trying to make him sit down, but he stayed stubbornly upright.

Then suddenly the guests were gone, all of them at once, as if they had heard some secret dog whistle. The living room held no one but family, and it seemed too bright, like outdoors after a daytime movie. A decimated cheese board rested on an ottoman, and cracker crumbs littered the rug, and someone’s forgotten shawl was slung across the back of a chair. Ree Bascomb’s maid tinkled glassware in the kitchen. The toilet flushed in the powder room, and Tommy returned to the living room still hitching up his pants.

“Well,” Red said. He looked around at everyone.

“Well,” Amanda echoed.

They were all standing. They were all empty-handed. They had the look of people waiting for their next assignment, but there wasn’t one, of course. It was over. They had seen Abby off.

It seemed there should be something more – some summing up, some account to deliver. “You wouldn’t believe what Merrick said,” they wanted to report. And “You’d have laughed to see Queen Eula. No sign of Trey, wouldn’t you know, because he had an important meeting, but Queen Eula came. Can you imagine? Remember how she always used to swear you were a Communist?”

But wait. Abby was dead. She would never hear about any of this.

8

IT COULD BE ARGUED that with Abby gone, there was no further need for anyone to stay on in the house with Red. He was more or less able-bodied, after all, and he went right back to work the morning after the funeral. That afternoon, though, he came home early and slipped upstairs to bed, and if Nora hadn’t walked into his room with a stack of folded laundry he might have lain there undiscovered for who knows how long, one hand clamped to his chest and a line of either pain or worry crimping his forehead. He said it was nothing, just a tired spell, but he didn’t object when Nora insisted on Denny’s driving him to the emergency room.

In fact it was nothing – indigestion, the doctors decided six hours later, and he was sent home along with all four of his children, the other three having assembled at the hospital as soon as Nora phoned them. Still, it started his daughters thinking.

They had agreed, till then, that there would be plenty of time to sort out the household arrangements. Let things settle a bit, they told each other. But the rest of that week, both girls seemed to be on Bouton Road more often than they were at home – and generally without their husbands and children, as if to show that they meant business. They would wander in on some errand, Jeannie wanting Abby’s recipe box or Amanda bringing grocery-store cartons to sort Abby’s clothes into, and then they would hang around engaging one or another person in pointed conversation.

“You know we can’t depend on Denny in any permanent way,” Amanda told Nora, for instance. “He might promise us the moon, but one day he’ll up and leave us. I’m surprised he’s lasted this long.” Then Denny walked into the kitchen and she broke off. Had he heard? But even after he’d set his cup in the sink and walked out again, Nora made no reply. She slid cookies off a baking sheet, her expression pleasant and noncommittal, as if Amanda had been talking just to hear herself talk.

And Stem! Maybe it was grief, but he’d become very quiet. “Underneath,” Jeannie tried telling him once, “I think Dad has always assumed that you and Nora would live here forever. Inheriting the house, I mean, after he’s gone.” Then she sent a guilty look toward Denny, who was sitting next to Stem on the couch flicking through TV channels, but Denny merely grimaced. Even he knew it was Stem that Red would have pinned his hopes on. As for Stem himself, he didn’t seem to have heard her. He kept his eyes fixed on the screen, although there was nothing to watch just then but commercials and more commercials.

After Sunday lunch, while Red was upstairs napping, Amanda told the others, “It’s not like Dad needs a real caretaker. I grant you that. But someone should make sure every morning that he’s made it through the night, at least.”

“A simple phone call could establish that much,” Stem said.

Jeannie and Amanda raised their eyebrows at each other. It was a remark they would have expected from Denny rather than Stem.

Stem wasn’t looking at either of them. He was watching the children playing a board game on the rug.

Denny said, “Ah, well, maybe sooner or later Dad will find himself a lady friend.”

“Oh! Denny!” Jeannie said.

“What?”

“Yes, he could do that,” Amanda said equably. “Part of me wishes he would, by and by. Some nice, nurturing woman. Though another part of me says, ‘But what if it’s someone who’s not our type? Someone who wears the back of her collar up or something?’ ”

“Dad would never fall for a woman who wore the back of her collar up!” Jeannie said.

Then Red’s footsteps could be heard on the stairs, and everybody fell silent.

Later that same afternoon, when the girls had collected their families and were saying goodbye at the door, Red asked Amanda if he should let their lawyer know about Abby’s death. “Goodness, yes,” Amanda said. “Haven’t you already done that? Who is your lawyer?” and Red said, “I have no idea; it was years ago we made our wills. Your mother was the one who took care of that stuff.”

Stem made a sudden, sharp sound that resembled a laugh, and everybody looked at him.

“It’s like that old joke,” he told them. “The husband says, ‘My wife decides the little things, like what job I take and which house we buy, and I decide the big things, like whether we should admit China to the U.N.’ ”

Jeannie’s Hugh said, “Huh?”

“Women are the ones in charge,” Stem told him. “Make no mistake about it.”

“Isn’t China already in the U.N.?”

But then Nora stepped in to say, “Don’t worry, Father Whitshank, I’ll track down your lawyer’s name,” and the moment passed.

On Monday, while Red was at work, Amanda arrived with more cartons. You’d think she didn’t have a job. She was dressed in business clothes, though, so she must have been on the way to her office. “Tell me the truth, Nora,” she said as soon as she had set the cartons in a corner of the dining room. “Can you imagine you and Stem staying on here forever?”

“You know we would never leave Father Whitshank if he really needed assistance,” Nora said.

“So, do you think he does need assistance?”

“Oh, Douglas should be the one to answer that.”

Amanda’s shoulders slumped, and she turned without a word and walked out.

In the front hall she met up with Denny, who was coming down the stairs in his stocking feet. “Sometimes,” she told him, “I wish Stem and Nora weren’t so … virtuous. It’s wearing, is what it is.”

“Is that a fact,” Denny said.

Red told his sons that he’d heard somewhere that after a man’s wife dies, he should switch to her side of the bed. Then he’d be less likely to reach out for her in the night by mistake. “I’ve been experimenting with that,” he told them.

“How’s it working?” Denny asked.

“Not so very well, so far. Seems like even when I’m asleep, I keep remembering she’s not there.”

Denny passed Stem the screwdriver. They were taking all the screens down, preparing to put the storm windows in for the winter, and Red was supervising. Not that he really needed to, since the boys had done this many times before. He was sitting on the back steps, wearing a huge wool cardigan made by Abby during her knitting days.

“Last night I dreamed about her,” he said. “She had this shawl wrapped around her shoulders with tassels hanging off it, and her hair was long like old times. She said, ‘Red, I want to learn every step of you, and dance till the end of the night.’ ” He stopped speaking. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. Denny and Stem stood with a screen balanced between them and looked at each other helplessly.

“Then I woke up,” Red said after a minute. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. “I thought, ‘This must mean I miss having her close attention, the way I’ve always been used to.’ Then I woke up again, for real. Have either of you ever done that? Dreamed that you woke up, and then found you’d still been asleep? I woke up for real and I thought, ‘Oh, boy. I see I’ve still got a long way to go with this.’ Seems I haven’t quite gotten over it, you know?”

“Gosh,” Stem said. “That’s hard.”

“Maybe a sleeping pill,” Denny suggested.

“What could that do?” Red asked.

“Well, I’m just saying.”

“You think every one of life’s problems can be solved by taking a drug.”

“Let’s lean this against that tree,” Stem told Denny.

Denny nodded, tight-lipped, and swung around to back toward a poplar tree with the screen.

That evening, Ree Bascomb brought over an apple crumble and stayed to have a piece with them. “There’s rum in it, is why I waited till I thought the little boys would be in bed,” she said. Actually, the little boys were not in bed, although it was nearly nine. (They didn’t seem to have a fixed bedtime, as Abby had often remarked in a wondering tone to her daughters.) But they were occupied with some sort of racetrack they’d constructed to run through the living room, so the grown-ups moved to the dining room – Ree, Stem and Nora, Red and Denny – where Ree set squares of apple crumble on Abby’s everyday china and passed them around the table. She knew Abby’s house as well as she knew her own, she often said. “You don’t have to lift a finger,” she told Nora, although Nora had already started a pot of decaf and rustled up cream and sugar, mugs and silverware and napkins.

Ree sat down at the table and said, “Cheers, everybody,” and picked up her fork. “They say sweets are helpful in times of sadness,” she said. “I’ve always found that to be true.”

“Well, this was nice of you, Ree,” Red said.

“I could use some sweets myself tonight. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but on top of everything else now, Jeeter’s died.”

“Oh, what a pity,” Nora said. Jeeter was Ree’s tabby cat, going on twenty years old. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him.

Red said, “My God!” He set his fork down. “How in the world did that happen?” he asked.

“I just stepped out on the back stoop this morning and there he was, lying on the welcome mat. I hope he hadn’t been waiting there all night, poor thing.”

“My Lord! That’s awful! But surely they’re going to investigate the cause of death,” Red said. He looked shattered. “These things don’t just come about for no reason.”

“They do if you’re old, Red.”

“Old! He wasn’t even in nursery school yet!”

“What?” Ree said.

Everyone stared at him.

“I remember when he was born! It wasn’t but two or three years ago!”

“What are you talking about?” Ree asked.

“Why, I’m … Didn’t you say Peter died? Your grandson?”

“Jeeter, I said,” Ree told him, raising her voice. “Jeeter, my cat. Good gracious!”

“Oh,” Red said. “Excuse me. My mistake.”

“I did wonder why you’d turned into such a cat person, all at once.”

“Ha! Yes,” he said, “and I wondered how you could act so offhand about your only grandchild passing.” He gave an embarrassed chuckle and picked up his fork again. Then he peered across the table at Nora. She had her napkin pressed to her mouth, and her shoulders were heaving and she was making a slight squeaking sound. It seemed at first she might be choking, till it emerged that the tears streaming down her face were tears of laughter. Stem said, “Hon?” and the others stared at her. None of them had ever seen Nora get the giggles before.

“Sorry,” she said when she could speak, but then she clapped her napkin to her mouth again. “I’m sorry!” she said between gasps.

“Glad to know you find me so amusing,” Red said stiffly.

“I apologize, Father Whitshank.”

She lowered the napkin and sat up straighter. Her face was flushed and her cheeks were wet. “I think it must be stress,” she said.

“Of course it is,” Ree told her. “You’ve all been through a world of stress! I should have thought before I came traipsing over here with my piddly little news.”

“No, really, I—”

“Funny, I never noticed before how the two names rhymed,” Ree said thoughtfully. “Peter, Jeeter.”

Red said, “You were nice to come, Ree, and the crumble’s delicious, honest.” He didn’t seem to realize that he hadn’t taken a bite of it yet.

“I used Granny Smith apples,” Ree told him. “All the other kinds fall apart, I find.”

“These are not falling apart in the least.”

“Yes, they’re great,” Denny said, and Stem chimed in with a not-quite-intelligible murmur. His eyes were still on Nora, although she seemed to have composed herself.

“Well!” Ree said. “Now that we’ve got the fun and games out of the way, let’s talk about you all. What are your plans, everybody? Stem? Denny? Will you be staying on with your dad?”

It could have been an awkward moment – people were bracing for it around the table, clearly – except that Red said, “Nah, they’ll be moving out shortly. I’m going to get myself an apartment.”

“An apartment!” Ree said.

The others grew very still.

“Well, the kids have their regular lives, after all,” Red said. “And there’s no point in me rattling around alone here. I’m thinking I could just rent something, one of those streamlined efficiencies that wouldn’t need any upkeep. It could have an elevator, even, in case I get old and doddery.” He gave one of his chuckles, as if to imply how unlikely that was.

“Oh, Red, that’s so adventurous of you! And I know just the place, too. Remember Sissy Bailey? She’s moved into this new building in Charles Village, and she loves it. You remember she had that big house on St. John’s, but now, she says, she doesn’t have to give a thought to mowing the lawn, shoveling the snow, putting up the storm windows …”

“The boys were putting up our storm windows just this afternoon,” Red said. “Do you know how many times I’ve been through that, in my life? Put them up in the fall, take them down in the spring. Put them up, take them down. Put them up, take them down. Is there no end? you have to ask.”

“Very, very sensible to ditch all that,” Ree said. She sent a bright look around the table. “Don’t you all agree?”

After a brief hesitation, Denny and Stem and Nora nodded. None of them wore any expression whatsoever.

Amanda said it was sort of like when you’re playing tug of war and the other side drops the rope with no warning. “I mean, it’s almost a letdown,” she said.

And Jeannie said, “Of course we want to take him off our worry list, but has he thought this through? Moving to some teeny modern place without crown moldings?”